ADJECTIVE SEQUENCING IN GA

Yvonne Akwele Amankwaa Ollennu

Abstract

The use of multiple words to describe nouns is a common phenomenon in language and languages that have adjectives employ this word class.Ga, a Kwa language of the Niger Congo, branch is no exception, whereas languages without adjectives may use other lexical categories like nouns and verbs which play the adjectival role. Ga has adjectives and employs them as attributives for nouns. The paper examines the syntactic rule governing the occurence of several adjectives serving as attibtutes of a single head noun. In this paper the noun is considered as the head of the Ga Nominal Phrase. The order of these adjectives has not received scholarly attention in Ga and this is to fill that gap in the literature. I argued that the order of adjectives is not haphazardly arranged but follows a laid down syntactc prescription. For instance the data showed that Dimension adjectives normall occur in first position, whereas colour adjectives occur further from the head noun. It was also revealed that in the ordering of adjectives in which Value adjectives is included, the Age adjective occurs in last position and Value adjective occurs first or last when included in the ordering of adjectives for a noun. Consequently, it is opined that defying the arrangement in the ordering of the adjectives resulted in unacceptable forms.The adjectives are grouped according to Dixon semantic classes. Data is gathered from native speakers of Ga. The findings contribute to the existing literature on adjective sequencing in Ghanaian languages.

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